Blog

One of the many pleasures of intranet consultancy is that you get to meet employees who are keen to tell stories (always constructively) about their work and what they need in the way of information. It does not take long to discover that they have evolved workarounds...

The potential requirement for being able to search collections of documents can be traced back to a conference organized by the Royal Society in 1948. The first technical step was set out in a Masters thesis submitted to MIT in 1951 by Philip Bagley and...

For many years now web interface designers have taken care to support employees who have a range of physical and visual conditions that have an impact on the extent to which they can use a computer interface effectively. Most designers are conversant with the Web...

Over the years there have been many books written on usability testing. ‘Don’t make me think’ by Steve Krug was my starting point for many years and my copy has quite an array of highlighting and comment. In addition, the work of the Nielsen Norman Group has been...

I have written quite a detailed commentary on some of the research that has been carried out by Microsoft Research into defining, measuring and enhancing productivity. One of the problems with assessing productivity in knowledge work is that the number of items...

The structural dynamics of the enterprise search business are very complex. Over 50 companies offer enterprise search-level software and in addition there are the embedded search applications in a range of enterprise applications (e.g. IBM, Microsoft and OpenText) and...

Over the last decade of enterprise search projects, the project objectives have changed from “Help us chose a search application” to “How can we get the best out of our current application?”. As an information scientist my focus has always been on the user experience,...

Over the last few years, the concept of ‘professional search’ has evolved rapidly. In 2018 the First International Workshop on Professional Search (ProfS2018) was co-located with SIGIR 2018. A good summary of the Workshop was published in SIGIR Forum. The workshop...

I decided I need to start something new to provide an additional focus to my working day when the outcomes of Covid 19 are dominating the present and the future. The result is that I’m going to be publishing posts on what I regard as important research that has...

Organisations are faced with supporting remote workers at a time when business priorities and processes are changing, and many workers will be taking on new and probably novel roles. This is not what intranets were designed for – seemingly endless hours of research...